Screen: Promoting Those Secenic Castles in Spain:'The Pleasure Seekers' and Other Films Bow 'Sex and Single Girl' Tenor's Biography

By A.H. WEILER

Published: December 26, 1964

HAVING promoted Roman tourism by tossing "Three Coins in the Fountain" at moviegoers 10 years ago, the powers at 20th Century-Fox are now attempting to do the same for Spain in "The Pleasure Seekers," which arrived at Loew's State and other theaters around town to celebrate the holiday season. Spain never looked lovelier, but the banal romances of the lightweight principals in this retooled vehicle make the trip wholly unnecessary.

Talk about your castles in Spain. The saccharine confection concocted here is just the dessert little starry-eyed girls who read reconstituted romances in certain magazines dream of. As was the case in "Three Coins," we again have a trio of decorative American lassies, who have a charming apartment, the wherewithal to get by easily and dozens of wolfish males eyeing them hungrily but the manufactured problem of being unable to capture the elusive gents their hearts desire.

There is the blonde Carol Lynley, the pert, pretty and efficient secretary of Brian Keith, bureau chief of an American news agency, who pines for her married employer and ignores the quiet adoration of Gardner McKay, young hot-shot reporter. There is cute, vacuous Pamela Tiffin, who sighs for that rich, local playboy, Tony Franciosa, but will settle for nothing less than marriage. And then there is the passionate, extroverted, honey-haired singer-dancer, Ann-Margret, who wants to be married to that shy, young, impecunious, provincial doctor, André Lawrence. The happy endings should be apparent almost at their beginnings even to a viewer who has had more than his share of sherry.

Jean Negulesco, the director, who was also responsible for "Three Coins," and Daniel L. Fapp, his cinematographer, have put their color cameras to artistic use in focusing on the Prado and some of its El Greco and Velasquez master-pieces, and in Toledo's Church of San Tome and El Greco's magnificent "The Burial of the Count of Orgaz." There are also fleeting scenic shots of Madrid's plazas and bull ring, the beautiful terrace restaurant overlooking Toledo and the beach at Estapona and its native fishermen and dancers.

The performances, on the other hand, are largely drab. The lovelorn young women are a feast for masculine eyes as they cavort about in short night shifts, bikinis and revealing dresses. What they have to say is never revealing. Miss Lynley succeeds only in projecting a pouting sadness. Miss Tiffin easily handles a role calling for wide-eyed naïveté. But Ann-Margret, who sings numbers by Sammy Cahn and James Van, Heusen titled, "The Pleasure Seekers," "Something to Think About," "Everything Makes Music When. You're in Love," and "Next Time," with less than memorable effect, turns in a performance that is merely a credit to her curvaceous figure.

It will surprise a moviegoer to see her start a flamenco dance with that superb practitioner of the art, Antonio Gades. The dance suddenly dispenses with his talent and ends with that tempestuous young woman belting it out as a hot, sensual ditty. As Miss Tiffins's pursuer, Tony Franciosa is simply unctuous and slick. Gardner McKay is tall, dark-eyed and wooden as Miss Lynley's opposite number; André Lawrence is tall, dark-eyed and doleful as Ann-Margret's diffident doctor, and Brian Keith is both weary and abrupt as the bureau chief who forsakes Miss Lynley for his wife, a role played in equally weary style by Gene Tierney.

They all get in the way of whatever beautiful scenery is on hand to make "The Pleasure Seekers" a good deal less than a pleasure.

"SEX and the Single Girl" brought out the single gals in droves and clusters yesterday to the Rivoli and the Trans-Lux 52d Street. One mildewed bachelor, fearing disaster, bravely latched on to a balcony perch and finally exited with a slight stagger. It's not the worst picture ever made, girls and boys. No kidding.

Not even with Natalie Wood being archly pursued by Tony Curtis for over two hours and, most fortunately, with Lauren Bacall, Henry Fonda and Mel Ferrer bringing up the rear.

That simpering title — all that's left of Helen Gurley Brown's hope-chest best-seller—still tells the story and flavor of this Warners release. Now there's a plot, involving Miss Wood as Helen Gurley Brown, a maidenly, 23-year-old research psychologist on advanced marital and pre-marital studies. Yeah man! And Mr. Curtis is a scandal-magazine writer who blasts Dr. Wood's (or Brown's) best-selling book, then stalks her personally, blandly borrowing the problems of his neighbors for soulful couch musings and amorous bait.

Off to a brisk start, the picture is steadily suggestive. And while Miss Wood is extremely wide-eyed and jittery throughout and Mr. Curtis tends toward cuteness, their scenes hit only one dull, sour snag, in a fumbling near-seduction. It's the old-timers—Miss Bacall, Mr. Fonda and Mr. Ferrer—who really count, as they suavely steal the show.

The film is extremely easy to take when it holds to a broadly satirical course, letting the buckshot fly at everything—sex, money, marriage, advertising, research foundations and the business of love. And most of the time the director, Richard Quine, nimbly keeps his cast gamely hopping and wisecracking.

Furthermore, the two scenarists, Joseph Heller and David R. Schwartz (using a "story" by Joseph Hoffman), have supplied some genuinely amusing, peppery dialogue and incidents. The slyest, and funniest, has the two young, muddled protagonists yammering about love and Freud at a zoo, tiredly watched by monkeys and baboons.

Perhaps it's appropriate that the handsomely colored picture ends, like a wildly stirred mulligan stew, with all of the principals behaving like Keystone Kops in a crisscrossed careening of autos on a freeway. Overdone, yes, but it still makes sense after what's happened before.

Leslie Parrish and Fran Jeffries make luscious sideline ornaments, the latter superfluously singing — and singing well—three tunes, including the ghastly title ballad. As for Miss Wood and Mr. Curtis, at least, they deserve each other.

But Mr. Ferrer, surprisingly deft as a casual psychiatrist, and Mr. Fonda and Miss Bacall as Mr. Curtis's scrappy neighbors, supply the real spice and fun, especially Miss Bacall who has the wittiest lines and all but pierces the picture with her buzzsaw growl.

Sex and the single girl? Fooey. Three cheers for the old folks at home.

FANS of the golden-voiced tenor Richard Tauber should get their musical money's worth from "You are the World for Me," the subtitled Christmas offering at the uptown Casino Theater. This Viennese-made film is like dozens of other purportedly biographical movies in dramatizing the life of Mr. Tauber, who is played by Rudolf Schock.

However true, it still seems as old as the hills. This time the hero is a minor functionary at an Austrian opera house. Then the first tenor breaks a leg. You guessed it. And as the singer rises to world fame, little does he know that his true love back home is dying.

The picture is sweet, sentimental, dawdling and extremely pleasing to hear. Once it hits the groove, after a good half-hour or so, the music seldom ceases—folk melodies, operettas and operas—and the voice used is, thank heaven, Mr. Tauber's own.

Rather oddly, while the story ends in a typical batter of suds and tunes, the final dramatic flavor is one of dignity, at least. Mr. Schock's portrait of the singer is that of an earnest, friendly chap. And Annemarie Dueringer is quite appealing and restrained as the frail dancer who loves him. Richard Romanowsky, Fritz Imhoff and Dagny Servaes are all right in lesser roles. And the music, once Mr. Tauber's voice takes over, is above reproach.